


cold as numbers

by remnantof



Series: earth 16-2 [2]
Category: Batman: The Animated Series, DCU, DCU - Comicverse, DCU Animated, Robin (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Astrology, Astronomy, Birthday, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Development, Character Study, Death References, Earth 16-2, Established Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Identity, Implied Torture, Interracial Relationship, Loneliness, Love, M/M, Magic, Multiple Crossovers, Multiverse, Mythology - Freeform, POV Second Person, Psychic Bond, Psychological Drama, Psychological Trauma, References to Suicide, Shadow Mission, Survival, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-25 15:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/640098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That tried and true curse: know thyself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cold as numbers

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** This takes place in the Earth 16-2 created in "the corners of life," therefore is barely canon compliant. All (brief) sexual content takes place between consenting sixteen year-olds in an established relationship, as per the timeline created in the original fic.
> 
>  **Warnings:** If not covered in the tags, comment and I will add it. One thing I wasn't sure how to tag for is the theme of murder, necessitated by the inclusion of post-Jokerized DCAU. The story will involve the trauma of committing a murder and the moral questions posed by its context.
> 
>  **Helpful wikipedia entries:** Cancer (constellation), Vermilion Bird, Ghost (constellation). Or start with Cancer and follow it to the other two. The magic in this story is based on math and myth and obscure rules, things imbued with power by human belief—because I like to imagine that certain rules and structures could dissuade the Lords of Order from challenging spells set in place by Chaos: the means justify the ends, so to speak. The story is structured around the Shadow Mission game on the CN website, though playing through it isn’t necessary (christ knows I never get past level 12).
> 
>  **Canon notes:** Tim is sixteen in all universes: DCU Tim is pre-OYL, DCAU Tim is post-ROTJ flashbacks, and DCNU Tim is pre-Teen Titans canon. YJ Tim is still an aged up AU version whose backstory I continue to make up w/o canon input.

**19 July, Team Year 5: Gotham**

“Make a wish.” Dana and Jaime lean you forward in your chair, guiding hands at your back, and your father pats his hand against a place mat on the table, seated across from you. His legs are up on another chair, his cane across his lap. He pats a rhythm you lose focus on quickly, closing your eyes for effect and blowing across the cake. Dana made it herself, and she matches Jack’s groan: when you open your eyes, twelve candles weave smoke into the air, and four burn at the edges. Jaime laughs, pityingly, and leans over you to blow them out. _Happy birthday_ rings through the apartment, and Dana kisses the top of your head soundly, hugging you with one arm.

Comfort comes easy, these days, but you still reach a pointed look across the table til Jack relents with a shaken head.

“Alright, alright. Dana, give them some room.” When she moves, you turn your pointed look to Jaime, who keeps laughing at you. He shakes his head, dodges, finally stops to rear back with a loud _que_ when you grab his arm. Smiling while he pretends he’s never done this before. You have to pull him down by the elbow, until finally, still laughing, he kisses the side of your face. Dana cheers, bringing symmetry to the moment when she leans down to soothe Jack. His kiss is something of a reward, some agreement they had without you being put in motion.

She’s probably why Jaime gets to spend the night. It only seems fair, when she’s here as often as she’s not. You keep hold of Jaime’s arm, watching Jack sigh into her touch, then wave across the table. “Are we eating or what,” he asks, pushing the moment past its peak. Dana gets the knife, Jaime shakes you off, to find his seat. Your eyelashes tap an apology to your cheeks, and he shakes his head, hooking his foot under your leg to bounce it on the curve of his ankle, under the table. You practice some less-applicable footwork til Dana tells you to settle down. It feels good, to be told, when Jaime laughs and Jack looks from him to you, settles something in himself. Jaime might kiss you, but he makes you laugh even more—makes you something like a normal kid again.

Dana comes back to the table, cutting the cake into uneven slices. “Not so exacting in the kitchen,” he teases, and she wipes a spot of icing onto his cheek.

You understand each other, lately. You were never meant to be alone together. Love wasn’t enough to make you happy: but aren’t you, with him happy, with four people sitting down for your birthday? Dana isn’t your sister, and your mother won’t walk in the door, held late at the office, but you’re going to be okay with that.

Two years is a greater leap, from two weeks to two months. You grew to fit in a layer of skin she’ll never touch. You miss her, more than the layers you’ve shed, the cells you’ve lost, but you can live without them and you can live without her. For your fifteenth birthday, you sat at his bedside and wished for him to wake up, and now he has. This year, you wish he stays awake, stays here. If he needs a cane and Dana and a few shouting matches about your boyfriend or grades to do it, you don’t mind.

“I hope you wished for those sneakers we saw at the Nike store,” Dana stage whispers, handing you the first slice of cake, “'cause that’s what you’re getting.”

“I might’ve,” you answer, squinting back at Jack. “The red ones?”

“You know in my day,” and Jaime is the first to snort, inching his foot in for another bump against your leg.

“In your day no one cared about sneakers, and you begged your mom for a suede jacket with fringe on the sleeves,” you say, just to watch Jaime’s face get red from trying to contain himself. “I’ve seen the pictures.”

Jack shakes his head, leaning his cheek into his fist, his elbow into the table. “My son has always been a snoop,” he announces, glancing sideways at Jaime. “You better keep him away from your phone.”

Dana shushes him, intoning his name and setting a plate next to his elbow. You exchange a look with Jaime, not knowing what to say. “Life not being an Usher video,” you try out, hooking your foot with Jaime’s and letting them rest, finally, “I think it’s going to be okay.”

When he lets the silence build through his first bite of cake and hums a line of U Got it Bad after the swallow, you let the tension break, and believe yourself.

-

“My dad’s kind of an asshole,” you apologize, when Dana takes him on one of their walks. An odd gesture, on your birthday, but not unappreciated. It’s only been three months, but you find it hard to imagine—not appreciating her. “He…tries to joke.” It drags your face into a grimace, and you can see Jaime’s face pulling to match before he turns it away.

“Dads,” he shrugs.

“Your dad isn’t an asshole.”

“No. But he has the capacity to be an asshole, about…things.” He swims his hand upwards, and you lose the moment to reflection. How you trip over each other, misunderstand, vent, seethe in the same space—but sometimes, the times when you do understand him, it’s so easy. “I’m not gonna get mad at you for it,” he sighs, “so chill.”

Right now, you understand that he’s still annoyed. You look down, swallowing a protest. Maybe you are making this about you, which is your own greatest capacity. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize for him,” he says, frowning at you.

“That was for me. I’m an asshole too, and nobody needs double portions of _that_.”

“Is that a subtle offering of more cake, because I think you should be offering me more cake.”

“Sure,” you laugh, running both hands through your hair. So much for easy: at least he pities you enough, to tell you what to do. “Whatever you want.”

-

**20 July: Gotham**

That night, you have the dream.

It’s less a thing that happens to you than a binding. You’re fixed to one spot, but at a midpoint, so you observe happenings above and below. The sky is black and vast, the sands red, white, borderless. You heart thuds as your breath picks up—an odd thing to dream, and odder still to know it odd. Trying to give in to the logic of the dream does nothing to relax you: the logic of the dream is that you can’t move, that you can’t breathe, that you look where you must.

Your head is forced down. In your hands is Dana’s cake—not because it resembles that cake, but because the sight pulls in the feel of her hand in your hair, the playful push against the back of your head and the smells she leaves most mornings, in the steaming bathroom. Sixteen candles rising from it, lit—

Blow them out, you have to—

can’t breathe—

You throw the cake. It drops out over the sand, but you aren’t meant to track it with your eyes. Your gaze is fixed to one point, the edge of what you stand on beyond your vision, until the candles are rising up into the sky. That, you can follow, sixteen flames lifting to the sky in a grid. Sixteen points of light, on white pillars. Leveling with you, they flatten. Four candles, four points of light, made of four separate flames.

Turning corner-wise, four becomes seven. The lights separate across the sky, until you distinguish them only as brighter stars. Southern stars, and the moon rising over the horizon to travel through their path. Where you stand, where your gaze is locked, is the dimmest patch of sky: the four struggling clusters of Cancer. Oddly specific, oddly apt, and the back of your mind is screaming at you—

It’s a dream. It’s all the back of your mind.

The moon passes through Cancer, its points more than a crab. The moon rises from a well, chases the ghosts from a pile of corpses. You struggle to make them out, find a familiar uniform, a haircut you will never forget, a sign that this is anything like your other dreams, but they’re foreign and ancient and far, far away. The moon passes on, into the necks of the hydra, but this is a different story. The crab, the monster, the lion, only pieces of the greater whole. Red drags behind the moon like the tail of a comet, like a rip in the sky spilling feathers. A great red bird, lit from behind, blinking the moon into a great white eye. It flies to the sun, crashing, burning, poking a hole in the universe from which a river flows. The bird goes under, and the air breaks as if for a storm, so that you gulp the wet air into your lungs.

The bird rises from the waves, a crab clawing its leg. Shaking it into the sands, the bird crushes it with delicate talons, dipping to taste the exposed flesh. On the bank, their figures monument-tall in the sand, Set and Anubis watch without feeling. When the bird flings the crab over a bright shoulder, Anubis dips his cane, draws it from the water and breathes life back into the shell. Reaching up, he places it back in the sky, and retreats to a tomb. A heavy stone slab is lowered into the entrance.

Set looks back to you, level with you, the inscrutable gold eyes of an animal you can’t place. It begins with a death, he says.

It begins with a death.

-

The world strobes like a light through a fan, but you wake in the dark. Jaime shakes you. “Que--what’re you talking about, Tim, Tim—wake up. Ay, you’re drenched—” You shake up from the dream, lifting out of the blanket and his arms, trying to slow you. “What,” you gasp, knocking his hand away, taking in the solid and normative confines of your room. “Stay,” he says, “I’ll get a towel.”

Assured now that it was a dream, it starts to fade out of memory. You retrieve your phone, flicking it open to google words in quick succession to plug them into your history: set, cancer, red bird, egypt, anubis, constellations. Nothing you’ve googled before, but there may be a familiar article in the results. Something to explain what your subconscious just vomited all over your night. It doesn’t linger, the way your dreams often do: by the time Jaime returns with a damp towel, you can’t tell him what you were saying, and neither can he. “It wasn’t a normal dream,” you press, trying to hold it together. “It was so _specific_ , I can’t believe I don’t remember.”

He wraps the towel, damp and cool, around your shoulders, wipes your face with the corners. “Scarab doesn’t sense anything, if that helps.” He defers, looking at the floor. “Well you’re not the most reliable source of intel, Senor Not-Compatible.” Leaning in, he holds the cloth to your clammy skin, kisses you soundly. “Just a weird dream, gringo.” He pulls the towel up to rub the sweat from your hair, then tosses it on the floor.

It feels important, to slide your arms against his sides, move of your own volition. This is your life, this is real, kissing your boyfriend until he says _hey_ , tells you it’s alright again. You hiccup an apology, struggle one last time to remember and make sense of the dream. It’s gone, it’s nothing, just anxiety about a night without patrol. “I don’t know if I can sleep,” you admit, and he smiles when he kisses you back against the blankets.

”So don’t sleep.” He kisses your neck, where you must taste foul: sleep-sweat and river-water. Lower, lower, his hands sliding down your arms into your hands. He breathes on you through your underwear, hums. Laughs, singing quietly, “Deep down you know it’s best for you, but you hate—”

You lift your leg and smack your thigh against his head. The night resolves: he’s easy, whether you understand it or not. “Don’t start, you’ll wake up the whole building.” In the morning, he’ll belt it out in your shower while you stare red-faced into a bowl of cereal. You’ll wonder what universe Bart came from, that he thinks this idiot could take over the world, would rule it by force. Tonight, he whispers Usher lyrics to your hip and drags your briefs down. Are there tyrants that cajoled their way into power: that simply asked, and received, because they were worthy of it? It’s the only way to imagine Bart’s future, even if you can’t imagine it the way he tells it. If the scarab was such a threat to Jaime’s humanity, so bent on the subservience of the human race, you can’t imagine it would let its host wrap his lips around your dick and suck you down, let your nails dig into his wrists while you hold on and try to stay quiet. He bobs his head, looses one hand to stroke you, finish you with both. At three months, sex is still egalitarian and set within what works. You’re expectant, ready when he shifts up and you shift down, to pull him out of his boxers and return the favor. Everything is like for like, balanced so no one—everyone—is left wanting, when the other goes home. Just enough structure to see you through it, understand the logical end to the start. There will be another round, after you coax him through with hard strokes and your tongue to the bottom of the head, and then kissing until someone is asleep.

You’re already warm, sated when he pushes deeper into your mouth, jerks against your hand and shoots. He pulls back quickly, wary of overwhelming you, and the last of it drags down your chin while you tongue the rest down your throat. It isn’t pleasant, just there, and easier to swallow when you don’t want to lift up your head. Stumbling blindly off the bed, he comes back with the bottle of water you keep on your desk, and the towel his feet found on the floor. “So nice to me,” you slur, when he drags the towel from your face to your navel.

“It’s your birthday,” he shrugs. You take the bottle and snort, til you taste him all over again. “No,” you say. “You’ve made speeches, about being nice to me. You can’t act like it’s a fluke.” The water is cold from sitting out, clearing your throat. You offer it back when he’s done, and he washes you from his mouth with the water swishing through his teeth.

He crawls back over you, sandwiching the towel between your bodies. “Okay, that’s not comfy,” he realizes, rolling you both over and getting rid of it. You settle on top of him. “Shockingly,” he resumes, exhaling into your hair as your weight settles, “you’re nice back.”

”Shockingly,” you parrot, worrying his collar with your teeth. He swats his hands up to your head, and you bite harder. This is egalitarian too: annoying him, little bites because he wouldn’t care if you sang. He flicks your ear, til you hide it against his chest and turn your teeth away. “Stay,” he says, drawing the word out in the dark, his hands smoothing together over your hair. “Just stay.”

”Don’t worry, I will.”

-

**18 October: Central Park**

Your father is dead.

You’re taking the latest incarnation of Gamma squad to clear out one of Ivy’s nests in Manhattan when the feeling hits you, reels you into a shallow sheet of plastic fencing along the path. Something screeches, a plant lashes out and you can see Tye’s hand, as big as your head and growing, snapping a tree limb back like it it’s a dead twig. “Rob,” his voice resonates, drawing Cassie down from the dark sky, and you can see and hear these things happening, but Jack’s last words are coming at you through a comm at the same time. Impossible words, things you’ve never heard in your life, but they fill up your immediate memory and make you feel crowded, up against a wall. But there is no wall, there is no crowd, just a crack like lightning and a high, ugly laugh.

And Bruce telling you no, telling you he’s sorry—

Someone is pushing between you and your team, has them knocked back and kicks you over while you gasp for air. Klarion is meters away, his smooth blue skin and swooping horns moving in your peripheral, and your team is further still. And your father is dead, dead, dead—

Gasp. Shake it off. You left him safe at home, date night with Dana and you’re not _psychic_. This is a trick, this has to be a trick, even if you can feel your armor falling away. You’re clawing at yourself, stripped and throwing the door open, stepping over a body and that’s a boomerang in his chest and his blood on the floor. The familiar floor—but you’ve never seen it before. What apartment, what boomerang? Your old man’s been dead for years, and what did he think would happen, working for a guy who called _himself_ Two-Face?

Two-Face is in Arkham—

That isn’t it, either. There’s a cooler voice, too many voices—and the coldest layer sinks heaviest in your mind. He’s fine. He’s safe, and far, far from New York. Bruce would tell you, if anything happened to them.

Them.

She’s dead: that as much as the experience of _agreeing with most of yourself_ weakens you into a moan. Klarion is closer now, and jubilant. “I forgot!” he cackles, stroking his ginger familiar, probably speaking to it. “That spell was so _boring_ to pull off, and so much NOTHING happened, I forgot!”

You look up at him, as if seeing him for the first time: “Klarion?” It sends him deeper into arrogant hysterics. Why is he here, you ask yourself. What is he doing? However capricious, Klarion is some species of friend.

Friend. Now you laugh, and stagger sideways under the weight of yourself. It’s like the sublime acoustics of a haunted building, where nothing occurs but a rumbling fan can make you cold, make you see a thing that isn’t there. There’s nothing _in_ you, yet ghosts are real, the dead walk again and your head is splitting four ways—making room for cold calculation, an angry scream, and someone going willingly into shock.

None of them are very helpful. Klarion kicks you into the plastic net of the fence again, and slides back for a brief tangle with—Cassie? What is she _wearing_? He knocks her so high, Tye has to stretch himself larger, shuffle two creaking steps back to interrupt the arc. Tye springs her back into action, just like they practiced, while you try to place his face and part of you wants to know, when did Apache Chief have a kid? You’re shaking your head, trying to shake them silent like water trapped in your ear: your squad can’t win this fight, even if you weren’t lying in the dirt for it. Bowling Klarion over just pisses him off, a storm of inhuman screeching and magic bringing new life to Ivy’s pets as he regroups.

If you could just get up, get _up_ , but Bruce is holding you firmly in both arms, your bare feet sliding in Jack’s blood. You’re crying so hard you can’t see, so hard your head hurts, keeps splitting and it needs to hurry up so the extra pieces will _leave_. Teekl stalks on precise paws to you, tail twitching. The cat sniffs your staff, rubs his face on the end. Her, his, her—the part of you going numb with grief wants briefly, to swat the cat away, then changes its mind. You scoop the cat into your arms, sighing out a long, clenched breath. Good cat: familiar, best friend. Anchor.

You’re stroking Teekl’s neck when Tye yells for you, voice diminishing as Klarion forces him back to his body. None of you have ever fought him before, but it feels like you have; fought and helped and fought beside. “Call for backup,” you tell Cassie, not trusting yourself to stand, to know the Cave’s frequency. You’re losing your mind, or gaining another, but slowly. You can push it back long enough to reposition your bo, feeling sick and feeling nothing at all, when Klarion sees the end of it to Teekl’s throat.

”I’m not going anywhere,” he screams, throwing himself at you, clawing you back to the ground with sulfur and cinnamon and orange peel in his breath.

”Wanna bet,” you choke.

You taze the shit out of his cat.

-

The cat and the crab tumble back through the sky with a puff of red smoke, stretched over a framework of stars until your joints are cold light, cold enough to burn and agony is agony is agony, your mind a four-spoked wheel turning circles and arguing the semantics of pain, until it loses all meaning. Except, you’re the wheel, and they’ll only feel the shock of each stone you roll over.

Does that make sense to everyone?

Fuck you, parenthesized with two kinds of silence. A withholding of the answer, and an actual void.

Klarion is screaming and laughing, splitting through your head. “I’m taking you with me, you fucking brat—”

Set steps on Anubis’ cane, and kicks your pieces back into the Nile.

-

A low, aggravated noise wakes you. Someone groans—you groan, feel it buzz through your teeth. But you weren’t the first.

Your teeth buzz a second, maybe third, time. Phantom feelings, the sense of a sound. Fans in old buildings, you think, and you can’t say it’s anyone else, telling you you’re full of shit. Anyone else: you say it aloud, feel fragmented and slow. Talking to yourself. Isn’t that the point, you but not you and too many to deal with at once? The multiverse is a known, someone thinks. Or will be, or was. Not to you, but someone tells you, this is possible. That has a rational explanation. That colder layer—the oldest, or oldest feeling—it sits back, scoffs, and suggests that you get up.

We’re in your head: deal with what isn’t.

Dad. _Dad_.

He’s fine, he thinks. You think. A second voice surfaces with an ugly laugh, a third—is just absent. You can feel him, his lack of surface-thoughts. It’s not unlike the link M’gann builds for the team, not unlike someone losing consciousness. You can cope. You can get up. Coughing, you wipe at your face, smearing a substance like ash or chalk onto and from it. The ground you stumble up from is pitch black, a dull quality that hurts your eyes. It’s dusty, softer than it looks, but when the dust settles, the grains are too fine, too dark, to distinguish a texture.

You look away, nauseated.

The rest of the landscape is no less surreal. The lack of color makes you look down at yourself, the red and yellow of your uniform both comforting and an obvious disadvantage. Folding your cape over it, you catch the clasp, kneel like a dark rock on the dark ground. The horizon is too close, and crawling tells you that the ground sheers off unexpectedly on either side, a ribbon of black terrain through a grey world. Grey sky, grey mountains. Grey trees with no leaves, growing ropey and thick through the dust. Not like trees at all, but an inversion: roots growing out of the ground.

It’s nothing Ivy would build.

It doesn’t strike you as a place Klarion would frequent either, but when you look to the expanse of black ahead, there he is. His coat shifts, but his hair and Teekl’s fur are unruffled by the constant, flat breeze. The air is dry, neither hot nor cold.

Your communicator crackles, unexpectedly. “Robin, can you hear me?”

“Mal? What happened?”

“Klarion pulled you into some kind of pocket dimension. He’s using powerful magic, but it’s not entirely out of the Zeta Beams’ range. I’ll keep you updated on our end for as long as communication holds. Your readings aren’t coming through correctly, but I’m working on it. Hang in there Robin, we’re coming for you.”

In the distance, Klarion folds his arms. You remember, without having met him, that he lacks patience. “Copy that. Robin out.”

It wouldn’t do to worry Mal just yet. The facade gets you to your feet, the voices in you quiet, but still known. They look where you look, wait for answers, gaze sliding up as the shuffling journey brings you closer to the ledge Klarion stands on. “What’s your game, Klarion?”

“What’s wrong Robin, don’t like my shadow dimension?”

You roll your shoulders back, cocking your head. Even as an act, it doesn’t feel like your brand of posturing. “I’m not impressed.”

“Heh, I’m going to take your team out one by one, starting with _you._ Have fun playing with my shadow beasts!”

You wait for opponents to appear, but the wind just pulls endless through the valley. Snorting, you heft your bo at him and his cat, sending off sparks. Teekl bristles with him. “Idiot, you don’t even have powers! Do you really think you’re a match for me, Boy Blunder?”

The smile crooking your face is unnatural, not yours. “Why don’t we find out?”

”Please,” he cringes, “I don’t waste time fighting children.”

Just setting deadly obstacle courses for them, you think, watching him blossom into red flame and smoke. The force of your bitterness lingers like a sore feeling in your throat, and your face still feels wrong. Like you’re new to the street again, set up against the night and Batman’s judgment. Trying to be Jason, instead of yourself.

He comes back, you think, as fervently and honestly as you wonder, _who_?

It’s going to be a long, long night.

-

Mal contacts you again as you grapple your way up a wall. It’s hard going, even without a sign of the _shadow beasts_ you’ve been promised. The dusty soil compacts at a certain point, like it’s been packed into a mold. The ground is flat, but so are the sides of each plateau, the walls of caves. The breeze follows you underground, through holes in the outfacing walls. They wouldn’t hold you at all, sheered off and thinned til the wind punches through.

The other walls barely do: your only advantage is the dimension’s unique physics. Whatever planet holds you is smaller than Earth, with a gravity you haven’t been trained in yet. Between it and whatever spell Klarion was crowing about in Central Park, you’ve thrown up twice, hot bile that didn’t soak into the black dirt: but it hurts less when you fall, lets you jump a little higher to punch a hold in the surface of the wall.

Makes it easier on your arms to hang there, taking calls. “What’s the situation,” you ask.

”I feel like I should ask you: either the Zeta issue is beyond my repair, or there’s more to this than a vacation in shadow-land.”

”What is it doing?” You bite your lip, kicking a new foothold into the wall and pushing yourself higher.

”I can send people in after you, not for long, but long enough to pull you out of a tight spot. I just can’t get a lock on you to pull _you_ out. I’m getting—four. There’s four of you, but none of you at the same time. It makes no damn sense to me kid—”

”Send Beetle,” you blurt, fear dragging up through you. “Please,” you add, “if you can. I need to ask him something. I think you’re right, I think there was something else. He mentioned a spell he’d cast before this, something that was going into effect when he showed up. And earlier, he said he was going to take us out one at a time, starting with me. He’s messing with my head, and it’s messing with the tech. I need Beetle to confirm something for me, if you can get hold of him.” It’s back to the dream, back to sweet sixteen and candles in the sky, something you can’t remember when you’re awake. Jaime might remember, and, more importantly, Jaime knows where you live.

”Blue might be hard to get up here at this hour, but I’ll put him on the list. Nightwing is aware of the situation, he’s flying in from Washington with Zatanna on the line. Wants to call in Fate, but tall, gold, and logical isn’t too concerned with this one. Sorry kid.”

”With my luck today, I’d end up in the helmet for the rest of my life,” you say, forgiving and forgetting. Dick wasn’t there that night, but he’ll understand, he’ll swing by the apartment for you. You can’t lose him again, lose another one, even if it feels like you already have. Three times over, four times over, with different levels of hurt and indifference. It was a long time ago. It was hours ago. Years. Your grip falters. “I’ll let you know if I get into a tight spot,” you say, “but for now, I’m just trying to climb out of a hole in the ground.”

”Any supplies I should send?”

You think about the ribbon of land, dusty earth and roots holding it all together. Grass, as black as the dirt, ripples in clumps, barely visible at the edges of your track. Still, you never seem to run into—”Water. Send water.”

”Copy that. Mount Justice out.

-

Mal returns to readying the team, and the world is silent but for the crunch of the earth, the pitch of the wind, the lack of room in your own head. They move with you, quieter for now, for what needs to be done, but they test your body while you jump and climb. Long legs, long arms. You get a good height on your jumps even without the altered gravity, but your grip is still weak for their tastes. Nothing so unfamiliar, but each of them wondering: why are you so _new_?

Why aren’t you? Push them out, the wheel turns and it’s like—trying to stir instant coffee. The result’s never palatable, but the action gets you by. Up another three feet of the cave’s wall, your fingers picking at the edge of the exit. Someone digs your nails harder, deeper into the chalky cliff, and hangs you from it. Lift, he says. _Drag_. For your life. It could be for your life.

He sounds like Bruce.

 _Don’t_ , you think, as firm and focused as you can. Push them again: don’t do that, don’t—your throat closes up. Another seethes hot and—he feels fermented. Contained and going slightly off. That one raises your other hand, panic clawing through you, and settles your grip properly. He lets go, you hang your own weight on your own grip, pull yourself up enough to roll onto the ledge and pant.

The third one does nothing, doesn’t even push you back when you turn your attention inward again. Cold, fermented, bleak. You wonder what you feel like, to them.

Weak, thinks the first. Afraid.

Fucked up: the second. Not fucked up enough.

-

There is rest: after enough walls are scaled, enough chasms jumped, a pulsing white light consumes the space and drops you somewhere else. Not a new dimension, if your comm link is any indication, but a new stretch of obstacles. If nothing else, it’s a reason to go forward, an indication of progress. Perhaps one of the jumps will send you home.

Dick and Conner drop in, testing the limits of the Zeta beam and providing supplies. Dick takes stock of the surroundings while Conner tells you Jaime will be there, a grit to his teeth that suggests he’ll drag him. You don’t laugh, wouldn’t laugh, but the desire bubbles through you. Who is Jaime? Who is Conner, in that shirt, with that scowl? That’s not Kon. He’s so serious, so moody. “Your ears,” you start to say, but his narrowed gaze brings you back to yourself. Why would he have pierced ears?

Why is Dick so _young_?

Jason—

Jason’s age.

Jason is dead.

Jason is—

The coldest voice withholds, always with purpose. Dick’s hand lands on your shoulder, the weight of it saying what he won’t, with Kon—Conner—nearby. “Be careful,” you tell him, startling him into a laugh, but: “I’m not kidding. We’re all targets. I’m a bit player—”

“Robin, you’re anything but.”

“ _I’m a bit player_. Maybe this is about Robin, about you—but maybe I’m bait. Or the beta run before he debuts the alpha version of this trick on the rest of you.” As he disappears, as the weight of his hand blinks out of existence—he rears back to look at you, then nod. You feel talkative, confident, ahead of him. Concern for your safety feels secondary to the case. Everything is secondary to the case: everything is secondary.

Shake yourself. “This is happening to _me_ ,” you say. Less confidence, a tremor and you go silent, kicking dust. “You’re just…pieces of it.”

-

The next level is different. It raises your spirits, to see a change. Mechanical structures jut from the earth, still and creaking until you approach. Platforms drop you into pits and hold you over the heads of eyeless, mouthless creatures. Shadow beasts, you recall: they lumber idly, pacing animals. Forelegs like lances, horned, oblong heads. They don’t jump, and you hold yourself still to observe. They don’t seem like much of a threat.

Only two. You can handle two, jump back to the platform if it gets bad. The third part of your mind is a muddy sense of sleep, rolling over. He asks a question, weakly, too weak to make out. “I don’t know.” The beasts don’t react to your voice. You let him curl you up, like being invited into the blanket of your cape. “I don’t know, I’ll ask Jaime. I’ll find out. Go back to sleep.”

Let one of them sleep, leaving you free to roll off the platform. Hit the creature’s back, test the density, reaction time, stay clear of those sharp arms. It lumbers down, moving in stages. Goes down flat and hard in the dirt, with a wet meat sound that turns your stomach. They smell like tar, stale sweat, gun powder, matches. Flammable and breakable, but hard to the touch, and your blows make a sound like thick flesh. Strike, strike, joints and the horned helmet skull.

The second creature sideswipes you, it’s inexorable approach too slow to register as a threat. It’s a hard blow, impossibly hard. Everyone is present in your pain, even the third voice, reaching for you, through you. The first wants you to move, the second dissolves into wet, ugly laughter. The third wants you to lie down, nurse yourself. Curl around the hurt and stay there, until it goes away. But it will never go away. It will always hurt, nothing will hurt this much and nothing will make it stop hurting and nothing will matter ever again, never never—

“RIBS,” you shout, a habit from training. “Two, two. No puncture.” Tell yourself again: no puncture. The pain is known, physical and temporary. The long version of temporary, but less, for knowing. The first creature is getting up: a terrible flexibility of form. The arms lift, brace on the earth and push, lifting it up so that the stomach is the back, the back is the stomach, no difference and no reaction to your blows. Not even a shake of the head, before it begins another slow walk across the floor of the pit. You’re not much quicker, holding your side and snapping the bo out, sweeping your cape behind you. The wind blows, the creatures loom. Sparks flash from your bo to no reaction. There’s logic in it: electricity, shadows. But this is magic, this is an inversion of logic: rubbery physics and an exhausting grapple with jointless, seamless constructs that go down, get up, keep coming. You jump to avoid another blow, kick off the walls, rest on the raised platform. This is what he meant, this is what he promised you. It’s an odd fight: they don’t follow you up, can’t seem to jump or climb. They move mechanically, dulling your senses with their dullness. You could climb out of the hole, leaving them there, moving on.

The prospect of another long climb, in the soft walls, doesn’t appeal. And this feels necessary. There’s something to prove, there’s a forward-momentum in completing the obstacle laid out for you. Something will happen, if you can subdue them. _Something_ will happen. The moon didn’t hover in your dream, didn’t sit and wait. It moved, everything _moved_. You remember in pieces: a bird, a river, a crab. Sixteen into four into seven. Two. There are only two. Let them wander to the edges of the pit, the farthest they walk from the other, pick one, jump. They look heavy, move heavy, but a full assault knocks it into the air. Hit it again, again. Bounce it off the wall, let it reverse itself standing up. You bounce it off the floor and check the second, closing in. Rearing back, reaching, and you leave the first to drive it back. Keep them separated, keep moving, keep jumping. Keep hitting.

On the platform again, you crouch, rest, watch. The first creature struggles to plant its feet, then—plumes, wafts into the air like smoke. Your eyes wet behind the mask, and you lean hard with a grateful sob. Drag the air back in, find your second wind. One more. They go down. They stay down. You can do this.

When the second creature blows away, a gear turns, belts move, and a section of the wall lifts into itself.

It might not last, someone reminds you. Hand on the wall, you stagger into the tunnel before collapsing. You should go further, establish the tunnel before resting. Shaking your head, you push the voice back: you’re not—doing this. I’m doing this. I’m tired.

I’m right, he says.

He’s right.

No one says you can’t crawl to establish your perimeter, so you crawl. It’s no easier on your ribs, but it rests your legs. Lower gravity or higher gravity, your fight was like a round of suicides: fighting in one direction, turning and fighting in the other. Jumping to and from that platform. The air moves through the tunnel, no different for the altitude, for your surroundings, cool now on your sweat. No tar and matches smell: anywhere else, it would mean something.

When Jaime appears, you’re still on your knees, breathing and listening. He blinks down at you. The scarab doesn’t have to blink, he only does it out of habit, or for effect.

You know that.

You _know_ that.

“They said—I don’t have a lot of time. And that you asked for me.” Blurt. Blink. You’re staring up at him, studying the armor and sliding it around in your head. That symbol is—Blue Beetle, he’s Blue Beetle. What happened to Ted Kord, what is his costume made of, when did he take over, who _is_ he? Attention is pronged, layered—serrated, cutting back into you as the coldest piece of you starts searching for his face, under the armor. Don’t think his name, don’t think about him, this isn’t real and _he_ isn’t real and _you’re a means to an end_ —

“Are you okay,” Jaime asks, kneeling down to take your arms in his hands, his version of pinning you while he listens to his own internal voice. “You’re hurt. Ti—Robin. You’re injured, what happened—” He knows your name, your real name—that isn’t your name. But it leads to Bruce, to Dick and Damian and Jason who who who is _Damian_? Birds eye, fish eye, alien insect eye in facets and they’re echoing your head, the wheel spinning in the air because the cart has tipped. You’re dizzy and dazed, Jaime shaking you gently. His name is Jaime. Blue Beetle, Spanish, escarabajo and you’re sitting. You’re at a desk, pulling up a message board and looking at usernames. “ _Robin_ —”

How are you Robin, still Robin, ever Robin? Dad echoes up the layers and Steph follows, and Jaime shakes you harder. He doesn’t have a lot of time, and your head says _got you_ , and you tell yourself leave him alone _leave him the fuck alone_ , and push Jaime back a step so you can throw up.

“ _Tim_ ,” he pleads, pushing his armored hands through your hair.

“What did I say, the night of my birthday. It was so important. It was so—important.” You don’t have the time or energy to explain, to ask him what a red bird means, what he knows about stars. He wasn’t there, but he heard you say it, in your sleep. “Set said—he looked at me, and he said _it begins_. It begins with something, what did—”

“Nightwing said you wanted to talk about your _dad_ —”

“HE’S FINE, MY DAD IS FINE, EVERYONE STOP TALKING ABOUT MY FUCKING DAD—”

Jaime backs away, bumps into the wall but doesn’t quite touch it. “I’ll—I’ll come right back,” he says. Whisper. Blink. Time’s up, you’ll both have to wait for the recharge and you slam your fists into the dirt. “Let me _do_ this,” you yell at them. “Stop _studying_ me, stop _moving_ me or threatening—just—” You fold down, press your hands to your head til it hurts and spin the wheel back, spin it the other way, take the serrated walls between you and them and slice into him. Your dad is not my dad your Jaime is not my Jaime your name is not my NAME and I CAN’T—

“SHUT UP,” someone cries, with your voice. “Get out, get out, I’ll never get better and I’ll always be USELESS and why do you get to be Robin or Red Robin and I’m, I’m—”

The first one spins the wheel back, knocks into your will and locks it. The blowing wind is the only sign that time moves on, but you’re still, so still. You breathe in the taste of your own bile, but can’t move to get away from it. Your skin crawls, the sensation filters into you but doesn’t, gets divided up, distributed to four nervous systems instead of one. Interesting, he thinks. You’re still in his head, staring at his computer, and everything in him after the outburst is calm and smooth. How far does this go, how long will this last, can this be turned into a tool? You can feel the shape of it in his mind, the idea of pain distribution, hunger distribution, a team of alternate selves to send on errands while he patrols. He needs a real team, he needs to work with people, again. He’s so—lonely, living in a literal tower and trapped in a web of cases available at his fingertips. Jaime’s possible user page is sitting open on the screen, and you—overreacted, perhaps. The forum is for metahumans, teenagers, searching for answers and safety from a growing threat. He wants to help, he wants to...talk to them.

He wants friends. He wants—

a family—

The wheel creaks and shifts against you, shoves you back into yourself. You gasp for breath, rolling away from your puke and crawling deeper into the tunnel. You need to get away from that moment, physically far from the place where that happened. You sit down in the shelter of your cape, take your mask off because—because it doesn’t matter. Klarion knows, anyone could know, and you need to shake it out and wipe your eyes. “You feel so young,” he tells you, your voice hoarse and dry. “All of you.”

No, the second argues: “You’re just—a fucking—suhhhh-sociopath,” hissing the word and bursting you into hard, helpless laughter. He’ll never get it under control, you’ll never bounce back the way you used to, and Bruce will never look at you without a cowl of guilt pulled over his eyes. Your old man was set in his ways too, and it got him killed. Your father, your living father—is the flip side of the same coin. He won’t forgive you any more than he’ll forgive himself, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t your fault.

It was your fault.

The one thing they agree on, and you wipe your eyes again, retrieve the water Dick gave you. “Did anyone else have that dream,” you ask, when your voice returns to you or is returned to you, you don’t know. Fighting it hurts, fighting _them_ hurts, and the first was right. They’re in your head: deal with what isn’t. He feels as seamless and inevitable as the shadow beasts, but he has cracks, he has reasons. “Do any of you remember, what did he say?”

Our sixteenth birthday, they think, and you all slide down into memory. Jack and Dana surprised you, you’d forgotten—you were going stir-crazy and wanted to walk out to get a paper, but they had ordered your favorite pizza, and your friends came over, Steph was there. She had that bob cut, things were still okay and you were so happy—

Dead end. Flip the coin and he laughs and laughs, DEAD END and you spent your birthday in your room, sulking at every invitation to celebrate. Dick tried so hard, Babs called, and Alfred had every key, couldn’t be kept away. He’d stood at your side by the bed, put a hand on your head and said _oh dear_ , so impossibly himself that you’d finally cried. He’d sat down next to you and held your shoulders in one arm, telling you quiet stories of his life before the Waynes. The theater, the military, famous people you were too young to know about. And he had told you: “I had killed men before Master Bruce was born, for ideals, for the sake of my comrades and country. And now I have raised or helped to raise several boys, and learned to cook, and organize the world you all come home to in the morning.”

It didn’t change how Bruce looks at you, but it changed how you look at Bruce, and how you look at Alfred.

It begins, with—

You turned sixteen in your penthouse apartment, the clock on your computer turning over without ceremony. You got a card from Dick, signed by Barbara and Damian; a lead from Jason, but the real gift was his request for your help. Bruce built a dam with your name on it, Alfred sent a basket of home-cooked snacks.

Nothing from your parents. You knew why, and Bruce had told you as he did every year, that their identities were safe. You imagined them with another child, moved on. You got a new family: so should they. He would—not try so hard. Not fuck it up. He would spend time with them, not because he knew how easily it could be cut short, how he could lose them, but because he was a good, normal boy who didn’t let anything distract him from their love. He’d do it right, and you didn’t begrudge anyone—much less an imaginary sibling—a new life.

A new life, a red bird engulfed in the sun and rising from a river.

It—

“It begins with a death,” Jaime gasps, humming back into existence at your side and falling into you, urgent with the lapse and your own lapse in sanity. “You said, it begins with a death. What does it mean, _what is going on_?”

“I don’t know,” you admit, letting him wrap himself around you and hold on, until the beam drags him back. “I felt—something happened to my dad, but didn’t, it’s some kind of spell. The dream was a spell, but it didn’t do anything at the time because—because it begins with a death. Someone killed my dad, in another universe, or another timeline. Klarion’s created some kind of overlap to throw me off, and now he’s brought me here. That’s why someone needs to check on my dad, that’s why I needed you to come.” You’re shaking, exhausted by the truth of it—and how incomplete it is. It begins with a death, it it it: your father, the Joker, your mother, Jason Todd, Jason’s parents, your old man, Dick’s parents, Bruce’s parents, Alfred’s first night on the front lines, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

“What does it end with,” you wonder.

Jaime squeezes you tighter. “You, coming home.”

“Jaime—”

“No lies detected,” he jokes, hollowly. “Scarab says.”

“Tell Mal it’s inter-dimensional. Tell him three of the signals aren’t here, or are contained in the real one. Maybe he can figure it out, maybe I’ll find the right door—”

“Yes,” Jaime presses, “ _yes_. Think about that, keep going. We’ll be right here, we’ll come the second you ask—”

“I know, I know—”

“I’ll check on your dad—”

And he’s gone.

You sit there, soft and stupid like you were dragged face-first from the battle-pit. With no obstacle present but your own exhaustion, it doesn’t seem as urgent to push on, no sense of a looming reward for your long crawl out of the ground. Your brain has been scooped out, put in a blender, and poured back in. You feel damaged in a way that isn’t just an echo, of their own damage. Sitting still, and quiet, lets the contents settle again.

I thought I liked girls, the second voice says, without disappointment.

Is that why you collected clippings of Dick in tights?

They fume together, bickering without heat. The third voice is quiet again, and you slip into him through a channel of weariness. He’s curled up in Jack’s bed, wrapped tight in his blankets. He’s showered, scoured himself clean and gotten dirty again, stewing in his own sweat and misery. You try to nudge him, get him to get up and get some water, take another bath. You manage to roll him over, but he takes the blanket with him, wrapping it back in around his knees. We’ll turn into one of them, he thinks, of the other two. One or the other, and Bruce will let us.

-

So don’t rely on Bruce, you think, feeling part of yourself named, given shape, and slotted into place.

-

Klarion is a blue-white marker in the distance, almost glowing against the dark backdrop of his world. He resolves from the landscape when you wander closer, taking your time now. The going has been easier—too easy. With the walls torn open in your head, the lines blur between worlds. The calmer voice eats at his computer, staving off your hunger; the second bullies and buffers, sometimes hiccups into terrible laughter; the third sleeps enough for four bodies.

It’s not much, not real, but you keep going. There is a way out of this, out of pain carried in four minds and actions decided under pressure of committee. You don’t have time for them: you may need them.

Klarion shows no understanding of his mistakes when you face him. If a scowl can still convey triumph, he’s mastered the expression. “Give up,” he sneers, “you’ll never beat a Lord of Chaos.”

The Joker’s laugh rips through your head, down your spine. In a way, he’s right. But Robins die, heroes fall, and he put far too much thought into this action. In a way, he’s also wrong. “Is that all you’ve got,” you ask quietly. His eyes widen, the sneer pulling open his face to show teeth. You’re drinking strong, bitter tea, a universe away. Your throat clears, and you too would like to know: “What does this serve? Is true chaos death, when death is inevitable? Is it only an unlikely death, a death that ripples too far? Why is chaos the unfavorable outcome, instead of the least likely? Is it never the work of chance, that a hero survives?”

Sneer becomes snarl: “This is why you die first,” he points one sharp, blue finger at you. “I won’t be lectured on my own purpose, by some pathetic, mortal brat! You question the rules of chaos, as if it has rules! As if it is anything you understand—as if heroes and leagues and justice aren’t the agents of order!”

”I don’t think you understand either. Maybe you can’t,” the second voice suggests. “You’re the lightning, right? You’re electricity, not the person on the table, with your brain frying.” He laughs: “Not even—you’re just the guy throwing the switch and seeing what happens. A dumb kid with an ant farm and a magnifying glass, you don’t even get your hands dirty putting them out with your fucking thumb—”

“YOU WANT TO BE PUT OUT,” Klarion crows, pointing his finger up to the whirling grey sky. “YOU WANT LIGHTNING?” Triumph shines clearer in his teeth, and he holds the moment, holds the sky to his will while he laughs and laughs, then quiets, terribly. “As you wish.” His finger drops, lightning following the direction into the ground. “Have a nice fall!” A crack sets you all on edge, and you jump as high and far as you can before the ground gives way. Klarion walks back into the sheer face of the cliff, melting into it as the rest of the ground collapses. Hands folded behind his back, soon there is just his face, then his eyes and teeth, then teeth, then nothing.

Panic compels you to pull out the grapple, when gravity deigns to pull in your gut. It’s a slower fall, but a long one, and instinct is to shoot the line—even when you know the ground won’t hold. The hook burrows into the rock, angled to come out the surface. For a moment, the line holds in your hands, goes taught: but once broken the rock is dust, and no length of dust will hold you.

Your weight drags the hook out, flips your cape over your head and sucks your breath away like a punch to your gut. The brief pull of the line just bounces you into the wall, returning momentum to your fall. A blow to the shoulder sings to the pain of your ribs. Trying to dig a handhold in the walls pulls them both, jars your teeth, sends you on a slowed tumble into the deep pit. It isn’t the landing that knocks you unconscious, not immediately—but a culmination of blows and needs. Needing real rest, in your own body. Real safety, real comfort. A break from pain, fear, exhaustion. Hitting the ground is just an end to the drama of your fall, a moment to blink and breathe. You’re okay, it doesn’t hurt much to breathe. Breathe deeper, breathe longer. With the cape over your head, there’s no dust to suck in.

The perimeter, your injuries—

Shut up, you think.

Go to sleep.

-

**19 October: Shadow Dimension**

You’re in a car, driving in the dark. Rain pours from the sky, falls heavier from the overpass. Turning, the wheel plunges into a wedge of earth at the edge of the ramp, and water sprays up into the lights, over the hood. The wipers split and shove water from the windshield, the most pronounced sound. There is no one else on the road: just your lights illuminating orange caution poles on the curving ramp. Flash flash flash flash, then the white lines trailing into the dark, then the broken line, then mile markers. A sign looms over the road, but it’s not a sign, inverted: it’s a long sheet of green flame on the wet black road, stretching out to meet the hood of your car.

It’s not your car. You pass through the green flame and into the night, now a passenger. You’re in the back seat, the middle seat, watching the road with sleepy eyes. Your parents are silhouettes in their seats, and her hair is reaching damp into the dry air. It was Jack’s idea, to take you to see Haley’s circus that night. She isn’t speaking to him. “Mom,” you whisper, thirsty from crying, from the running heat. She turns to look at you, but you can’t ask, what you want to ask. This didn’t happen, or did, but it’s a dream. Dreaming something you can’t remember when you’re awake.

Another mile marker. You’re in the same seat, but a different car. Not so nice as the first, and your mother is smiling at you. No one is dead, and your hands are flexing around tape. A medal hangs heavy at your throat, and she pets you awake, more awake. “You did so well honey, let’s get ice cream. Can you make it for ice cream?” You mumble that you can definitely do that, and she laughs. Jack says he’s proud of you, but his name isn’t Jack, her name isn’t Janet, you are not Tim Drake. Not yet, and it will be a brief transition to Wayne.

None of this is what happened. You’re in the trunk, and the rain drives against the metal frame of the car and that’s when you know, with the note in your pocket, that your old man is gone for good. That he left you jack shit as an inheritance, which is to say, Jack’s shit. You’re going to get a beating or worse, and the rain is already drumming, drumming, drumming for your burial at sea.

“Don’t worry kid, they’ll pay up.” You’re in the passenger seat, gagged, with one hand cuffed to the door. Your kidnapper makes his living holding the children of wealthy couples for ransom, but he promises you he’s never had to hurt a single one. Their parents are soft, and even the ones that aren’t have appearances to keep up. It’s one weekend, an excuse not to get their homework done, and then he’ll disappear and never bother you again. All you did was open the door, and now you’re on the highway out of New York. He has a cabin. He’ll teach you to fish while he gets hold of your parents. They’re in Fiji, and you don’t cry. This, as much as their travel schedule, isn’t something you can control. It feels like pure chance, when the Batmobile closes the distance on the near-empty highway and drives up on your side. You look out the window, a gleaming black patch against the black night, and imagine Bruce looking back at you behind tinted windows.

No one gets hurt. New car, new passenger seat, and in every universe he drives with the lights off. Bruce is a heavy, silent presence at your side. Your curiosity is gagging you as much as the rag had. It must come off you in waves, but he makes no comment. He looks you over quietly, asking if you’re hurt. Looking down, you’re wearing too many clothes. Dirty rags, a white shirt, a robin costume you’ve never seen. You touch his enormous hand, and he is more than a mentor: savior, benefactor, father.

Your father is—isn’t—dead. You lay in his bed and listen to his voice on the answering machine, replay the last words he ever said to you and ignore Bruce’s calls, Dick’s calls, Barbara’s emails. If they broke into the apartment, you’d call the police. If Kon ripped the window from the wall, and two voices ask you _who_?

You don’t want Bruce, right now. You don’t want any of this, any of them: pushing them away isn’t an option, but you can leave them behind. Everyone comes together for the simplest thing: remember the rooftops, remember flying. Remember an act like peeling an orange, picking up a slice of pizza. The warmth of a shower, and there—there, you lose them. You have the warmth of a body, the warmth of your bed. What Jaime’s hands feel like in his armor, through your armor, through your shirt, through your skin. Warmth becomes heat, becomes dry desert air to replace the rain, and the sensation of flying. The sensation of your bike on a different highway, that they don’t recall. This is mine. Go away.

It’s not enough to get you home, the second says. This isn’t something you do with your dick.

Isn’t it, he’s countered, and they’re both building him out of the sands, the Joker a white pillar of salt on the horizon and you shake, but you lift the gun, and you shoot—

He screams through four mouths, so loud that a knock at the door rushes you to wake.

-

Tye is lifting your cape away from your face when you struggle upright, waking in a cold sweat and no air left in your lungs. His other hand, when you turn your head to stare and pant, is clutching his own shirt. “I thought—you scared the _shit_ out of me, I thought you were _dead_ —”

“I’m not,” you answer, hoarse and trying to place his face, again.

“Well _yeah_.” Watching the other breathe, you both calm down. It’s Tye, you tell them. It’s Tye, you’re in my head, figure it out— “Beetle wanted me to let you know, he’s okay. Your dad’s fine, still thinks you’re sleeping over. Jaime went in to get a book, scanned the place. There’s nothing there.”

There was also nothing wrong, that night. “Is he still there?”

Tye shakes his head. “Too worried about you to stay away. He’ll be back to base soon, I’ll…ask for someone to keep watch?”

”Please,” you insist, rubbing the side of your head, where it scrapped on the wall. You’re sore, too sore to get up and show it while Tye watches. You’re fine, don’t want them wasting time on this side, making themselves vulnerable if it isn’t an emergency. “Keep me updated with the comm,” you tell him. “No unnecessary entry, especially—rookies. One is enough, you know?” You try to smile: instead of stretching unnaturally, it doesn’t stretch at all. Your cheek is tender when you touch it, must be swollen. “Tell Nightwing, if he’s still there.”

”He hasn’t left. He’s got M’gann and Zatanna working with Mal. Mal says he’s arguing with Fate, again.” _Whatever that means_ , Tye adds in a huff. His eyes widen shortly after his mouth opens again, his next words lost when he fades from sight and earshot. Dick’s need-to-know habits about briefing continue to wear thin: for all you know, Tye’s abilities stem from a different gene entirely, are something like Cassie’s or La’gann’s, and put him at risk when Fate needs a new host. If the stories about Wally weren’t exaggerated, you’re all at risk anyway.

Heroes are the agents of order.

Staggering to your feet, you drop to your knees and have to try again. Even when you find your balance and start walking, you don’t feel like an agent of anything. Fate is doing you no favors, fate is—the worry that remains for your father, under the pressure of two dead men, three dead women. Fate is the devil in white handing you a gun for the devil in black, fate is life at the top of a tower, his blood on the floor, these voices in your head, and the foot you put in front of your other, over and over again. What else could you choose to do, this far into the game?

-

You don’t call anyone in, but M’gann appears as you begin the long climb from your hole. Tye may have inferred your condition without a demonstration, and M’gann doesn’t need one. “You are not well,” she says, after a moment of intense silence. Another moment, her eyes narrowed, and her head tilts. “You’re shielded, why?”

Hanging from the sheer rock face, you give a tired shrug. “Probably the same thing that won’t let Mal lock on.”

”I will break it,” and before you can suggest that it isn’t the best idea, you’re falling back into her startled arms, pain lancing through your head. “I’m sorry,” she cries, cradling you and ascending. “Robin, I’m so sorry, can you respond?”

”I’m fine,” you say. Your head hurts, and is alarmingly quiet. You reach out in your mind for the other links, for the walls, and find them in place, but—hot to the touch is the only way to describe it. Burned, but not burned away. “You did—something. I just don’t know if it’s better or worse. Have the readings changed?”

”Mal?”

”Even with Miss M holding you, the beam doesn’t want to lock on. You’re within reach, but out of reach at the same time, though I’m not getting four sets of vitals anymore. Now it’s like I might leave your foot behind, or something. Think you can live without your foot?”

”It could just as easily be a chunk of my brain, so I think I’ll pass,” you answer, cooler than you feel. You cling to that, even as you ask M’gann to take you as close to the lip of the hole as she can. “Zatanna has also been unsuccessful in attempts to resolve the overlap in your mind,” she reports on the way. “From what she can tell, the spell is very complex, and without access to you or Klarion for any extended period of time, she can’t be sure of all the strings attached to it. It may need to be resolved after your return to Earth.”

”It sounds like it needs to be resolved _for_ me to return to Earth.”

”Hence my attempt.” She does better than the lip of the hole: she sets you on the ground beyond it, and you can already see the next pulsing light, within a short climb. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. I’m sorry it—hurt.”

”It’s alright,” you say, watching her fade into the air.

”Mal.”

”Robin?”

”No one else, unless I call.”

”Understood.”

-

The next level introduces rain. It's heavy and insubstantial, hits like liquid and fades like vapor at the touch. You don’t soak, you don’t chill, but it drains something in you that you didn’t know you were using. Visibility is down, the noise is a constant torrent and hiss across the world, and it just—disturbs. You swat it from your face, even as it doesn’t stick or drip. You hide under your cape, take refuge in tunnels. It doesn’t bother the shadow constructs in the least, even the floating balls of flame that flare like false guides. You thought the first was another pulsing gateway and it had lashed out like a sentient thing to strike you.

The fire doesn’t burn. The rain doesn’t soak. It just hits you, quality versus quantity, until you’re exhausted in ways even you don’t understand. The first voice wants answers, wants to pick the feeling apart, and the second wants to wake up from this nightmare, and the third is just a weight, heavy and silent. A storm building, a force like the rain, a sick man on the life boat. A warning. If you could push him out, you think they would.

Leaning against a tunnel wall, you take a deep breath as another bat-winged construct breaks from the ceiling, screaming to find you, opening its mouth wider to release a stream of hard, white flame. You don’t even stand up to defend yourself, just use your bo to drive it against the wall above your head. When it falls into your hands, you beat the twisting form into the wall with your good arm until it crumbles, used to and tired of the things.

They come out of the dust, they return to the dust.

Is it so easy, he asks. You feel—subdued, feelings through a screen. They’re not real. But your pain is real, your wounds are real. “They’re not people.”

He asks, could you kill a person, so quietly.

Could you kill someone, if they hurt you enough? If they were going to hurt someone you love, enough?

Everyone is silent. When you answer, it feels measured, but easy. It feels like you’re answering for all of them: "Yes."

He’ll never trust us.

”He doesn’t have to.”

-

The rain stops in the next stretch. The return to wind and half-light settles something in your stomach, even as you realize—there’s very little in it. Pain shared, hunger spread—it’s the symptom that dulled, not the cause. You drink the rest of your water, eat a protein bar from your belt. With the sensation spread out, you’re not sure how bad your injuries really are: you can walk, your arms still function, if not at the same capacity, and you can breathe. Dizziness fades shortly after you eat, but the raw feeling in your head remains. Everyone is quieter, now.

You don’t know if you can do this.

You don’t know _how_ to do this.

”One foot,” you tell the monotonous landscape. “In front of the other.” Slower now, and not with caution. You don’t have room for caution, forcing your body to keep moving, motivating yourself to seek the next light, the next peak of the cycle. I can’t keep this up, you acknowledge: you watch your feet move, in spite of it. Can’t, can’t, and the third voice says, you don’t have to.

Can’t. Don’t have to. Just words, when your body keeps moving. You can’t, but you have to try. Ignoring him, you pick up your pace, running to make the first jump. Landing at a skid, you keep the momentum, make the next leap, hop a rock caught in a net of roots to reach a higher ledge. Your arm pulls, but they stay your grip, pull you up one-handed. Only a suggestion, he adds softly. When he does talk, it’s always soft, always weak. He can be so heavy, he can weigh nothing at all.

Keep me going, you think, and the raw lines, already weakened, fall apart.

Time and space mesh, four candles are seven, are sixteen, a net to hold you. You unclasp your cape and roll it from your shoulders. Rain isn’t rain, fire isn’t fire, and you need to lose the weight. Taking stock of your belt, you find another protein bar, three explosives, two flash bombs, five birdarangs, your communicator, two rebreathers, sample kit, first aid kit, extra lines, zip strips. The things you obviously don’t need are too light to really merit throwing away. The rest—you can think of uses for. “Its weight is as a whole,” you say.

“We can’t leave it. Use it...better.” You shift it up across your chest for easier access, for the new instincts in your hands. Your bo goes in the holster sewn into your thigh, and you stretch your sore body briefly before they return you to the track.

-

You judge progress by the wear on your gauntlets and the pain in your bones, read the promise of an ending—any ending—in the way Klarion’s teeth start to close around the world. The first stretches of your journey were hikes, climbs, with sparse obstacles. Moving threats appeared or didn’t appear, a looming threat or the key to unlocking a door—or a series of floating stones requiring precise applications of momentum and faith to traverse.

Now, he gives you both. You enter a tunnel, flocks of shadow-built bats break from the walls to hunt you with white fire. You reach the end of the tunnel, you face a herd of sharp-limbed constructs, the path beyond them broken up with spiked pits and floating fires. Your head hurts just looking at it, but with the flock behind you, there is no pause, no second thought. You can’t do this, but having it end here and having it end moments later are so much the same that you ready the bo anyway. Hit them anyway, jump on the backs of the beasts and try to outrun the flames. There’s no wall to open, no need to beat them all into the dust: just run, like hopping rooftops, like dodging gunfire from an alley when the floating fires flare to catch you. You clear the first, second jump, and start to see your next step, instead of focus on the moment alone. The earthbound constructs can’t follow, the flames stay on their arc, and you’re so afraid it feels like indifference, a cold fluid that burns in your core and makes you go faster, ever faster. You’ve been in a corner, you’ve fought for your life. The devil in white handed you a gun, and maybe you could have turned it on yourself, maybe there’s a universe where you _did_ , but he isn’t here. The devil in white handed you a gun, and you shot him.

You’re not a hero.

You’re not here to create order. Death is not chaos, death is not order—death is the end of influence, an inability to act on or in reality and it’s not for Klarion to decide. Death is a concept, you’ve held it in your hands and sat on its aftermath, identified its leavings, solved its contexts. To die here would be one more facet, would just give your counterparts the complete understanding they only brush against in the night.

Would make Bruce safer, three times over. Would make all of them safer.

Fire hits you in the back, without heat, and you miss the last jump.

”Stop, stop,” you tell them, breaking from the rhythm of their thoughts to scrabble at the wall, your bo falling away from you, into the spikes at the bottom of the drop. Unlike the wall, breaking apart under your clawing fingers, they bounce it away with a hard clang. The sound hits you, closer as you lose your grip and truly fall. There’s no time, no repeating your last mistake. “MAL,” you shout into the comm, no hiding now. “SEND BEETLE, I REPEAT, SEND BEETLE—”

Mal’s voice crackles a question, but your request was practical, not indulgent. The urgency of it has Jaime moving in the background, yelling your name and the sound ends in stereo, in person, as he flashes into the air and falls with you a moment before remembering to fly. “TIM,” he yells again, flying you both into the wall in a panic. The back of your head hits the wall, skids as he drags you both to a stop. Your breath seethes, in and out, through your teeth. “Take us down,” someone orders through you: “Before you disappear.” Squeezing you too hard with his hands, Jaime nods, but keeps you against the wall. He takes it slow, staring at you all the way down. When your feet met the earth, he doesn’t loosen his grip, or avert his gaze.

The armor crawls from his face. Death is a concept and a reality, and now you are looking at his face. It’s been long enough since you last saw him that he hasn’t trimmed any of the patchy hair that’s started to grow on his jaw. His eyes are wide, and his mouth is familiar around the sound of your name. You want to kiss him. You’re going to miss kissing him.

“I love you,” you blurt, communications open and your brain leaking all over the multiverse. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

”Shut up,” he argues, shaking you as tears glaze his eyes. He bounces you hard against the wall. “Stop, STOP. You’re coming home, you’re gonna be _fine_.”

If they could bring you home, they would have. If it was within a realm of possibility, they would at least ask you to try. “Tell him,” you say quietly, knowing there isn’t time to argue. “Please tell him, don’t let them lie to him when—”

“IF,” Jaime yells, squeezing you harder, but even his grip will fade.

If, please.”

”You’ll tell him yourself, you’ll see him—”

”Jaime. _Please_.” Your voice breaks. You don’t want to look at him, but you look anyway. This could be the last time.

”FINE,” he explodes, crying when he kisses you, kissing you when the pressure of his hands, and his body, starts to fade.

”I love you,” you repeat, to the rows of spikes.

”Shut the fuck up and come home,” the comm blares.

-

**20 October: Shadow Dimension**

Jaime stays with you on the comm while Mal sleeps. “How long has it been,” you ask, resting after a fight. Your fingernails grew, you think, when they have you remove your gauntlets. You have sores, from soaking in your own sweat, and new callouses on your fingertips. “This is night three,” Jaime answers. “You’re supposed to be home tomorrow.”

”What did you tell your parents?”

”The truth. They thought tu hermano recruited me to a gang last year. Worst case scenario, anyway. I think they thought this was worse than that at first, but now they get it. They know I need to be here.”

”Just not why.” It’s probably you, saying it, but you’re not sure. You leave it alone, don’t care. Except when you do, but this seems a poor time.

”Almost dying might give you more ammo for that,” he says. “Actually dying lets me off the hook forever.”

”Is that some weird incentive?”

”Tim, why do you need incentive?”

You don’t answer, immediately. Your long fight has only been two days, three nights. Your head is public property with no vacancies, and your hands are scabbing over in the dry air. Your cape is gone, your bo is gone. You’ve used your explosives and lines in its place, your bare hands. They hurt. You hurt. You’re tired. They talk to you and through you without you knowing the difference, anymore. “It’s not that easy,” you say. “She wanted to live. My dad, in that other universe--he wanted to. It’s not that easy when someone wants you dead.”

”He’s taking his time about it,” Jaime points out. “Maybe you’re not as easy to kill as you both think.”

-

You sleep, Jaime holding the line open to monitor your surroundings, jumping in to check on you periodically. See you, he admits.

”Jaime,” you ask, using a system of roots to scale another wall.

”Still here,” he answers, yawning.

”What if I get back.” The question bubbles to the surface of you, in pieces. There is a depth of loneliness in you, a hole dug four times as far, through four times the strata. They don’t know him, have only just met the possibility of him, and their fear is your fear. Your fear is theirs. “What if it’s too late to fix--the overlap. What if I’m _different_?”

Jaime yawns again. “Tim,” and one more. Mal will replace him soon, maybe Dick. “What if you were a shapeshifting alien? What if mi hermana shows up in a week as like, Booster’s sidekick? What if I’m next, and we have to live with four of me and four of my pinche scarab? As long as your voices don’t want you to exterminate half the people you meet, I will still get to complain more than you.”

”To me, mostly.”

”To you, or to whichever of you gets your ass back here.”

You smile. ”You’re cute, when you’re sleepy and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His answering hum is one you’ve felt on your skin: the back of your neck, your forehead, your mouth, your hip. You’ve never heard it before. You’ve heard it now. “So, most of the time.”

”All of the time,” you promise.

-

Jaime sees you through to a tunnel, helping dispatch another flock of fire-breathers. He fades with a hand in yours, and when you open the link, Mal has returned. "He's in bad shape," Mal admits. "He needs the sleep, needs to think about something else for a few hours." If Mal exists in their worlds, they don't know him, and you can't assert with any confidence that it's in his nature to share that sort of thing, even if it has the potential to weaken your morale. That everyone is just tired, and it's not a sign of hopelessness. What do you know, about hopelessness, that you didn't learn from somebody else?

What do you know about hope?

The light at the end of the tunnel is a white ball of flame. It takes up most of the space, and where the tunnel flares upward, it licks out to touch the walls at your approach. Normal fire isn't without patterns: fires breathe, fires follow paths of fuel and air, but this just waits, bobbing in place. Take a step close enough, it reaches for you. Stand back, it waits.

One foot in front of the other. Without your bo, you can't knock it apart at the black center, and without your cape you're missing a layer of armor, but you are a smaller target, without a metal staff to interfere with your roll. You sideswipe the wall, get a slap on the thigh, and put it behind you.

Put yourself between it and the next one.

The tunnel opens to a cave, mounds of earth floating in a tangle of roots, reaching up the walls to an opening. Another flame sits on the first rock, floating up to the next. If you jump on the first rock, it can hit you. If you jump from the first rock to the second, it definitely hits you.

Your leg aches. You find a thick root, grab it with your hands and ankles, and start climbing. They feel brittle and dry, but hold your weight, drawing you in a winding path beneath the rocks, then over the second flame. It flares out, reaches up to slap you, but misses. There isn't heat, but you can feel the energy transferred to the air, a tingle on your face. The whole place would fascinate you, if it weren't trying to kill you.

I'm still fascinated, you think, and you know the shape of the voice even without the separation.

Good for you.

The root leads you to the surface, points you back over the direction you just came, in the tunnel. It really is an ant farm. The narrowness of the dirt, the grainy textures, the muted lighting. You imagine Klarion as a giant, watching you crawl through his tunnels from the side, laughing at every setback. Trying to always go forward, without realizing that your world sheers off at a certain point, and you'll only have to loop back in and go up.

Chaos isn't the kid with a magnifying glass, you think. Chaos is the kid who just picks the whole thing up and shakes it, collapsing the tunnels into new shapes. It doesn't kill directly. Once you kill all the ants, there's nothing to do.

"Still alive, brat?"

Klarion isn't a giant. He isn't any taller than you, doesn't come off any older. It's a long stretch of dirt, butting eventually into a wall, but no more holes, no more spikes. Just Klarion and Teekl in your way, coat flapping in the wind, arms crossed. You don't bother getting up yet. If he's going to gloat, you're going to rest.

"They can't save you. I did this one right, I played by the rules. I got all the _numbers_ right, and didn't push any buttons—he died natural! He died when he was going to die, in some stupid mortal's plan. And then I had you, and there's nothing they can do. All their patterns, all their constellations, trying to explain the universe around them—nobody knows about stars like a Lord of Chaos." From the bitterness in his voice, it's more rant than gloat, but you take it, on your hands and knees and staring at him until he finishes. You're going to die. It'll probably be now, but you can die with some understanding.

"Why plan this? It seems...unlike you."

"To shake them up," he shouts. "To get away with something, to play with you and see what happens. But we both know what happens—how boring!"

"We're friends," you offer, but there's no feeling in it. You aren't sure what you're trying to say, what part of you is saying it. Someone...quieter. "There's a world where we're friends, and you were only ever lonely. You only had Teekl, and even he leaves you sometimes. You aren't bad, you don't have to be—"

Klarion walks up and strikes you with his fingernails, like a cat. He raises his hand to strike again, but just holds it ready, holding you up by the hair. His eyes glow, and your mask peels off like the glue has dried out. It's more than that, though: he can see into you, see how the walls have torn apart, how everything he did to you _worked_. "You still don't get it," he spits. "There's no good, there's no bad—I do whatever I want, whenever I want. I work for the Light when it suits me, I'm alone when it suits me—like when I want you _dead_ , one at a time."

"Whatever they promised you, it's either a lie or one more thing to get bored with, just like you get bored with everything else," you promise. There's no ruse, he'd see a lie if you told one--if any of you told one. "Admit it, failure is always more interesting. The ability of people to—walk away from it, and put on a face like it didn't happen, but they know they just brushed against disaster. You have to have that. Stars don't give you that. A hunk of rock hitting another doesn't give you that, pitting order against chaos to keep it all balanced—it's all _boring_. You think you'd be satisfied, if I fell down a hole and died?"

His lips pull back, treating you to sharp straight teeth. Sharper than they were before, and when you look up at his hand, your blood is on his nails. Teekl is hovering behind him, still wary of you with or without your bo, but close enough that you pick up his low growl. Someone tilts your head back and enjoys the pull of your hair in his fingers, the tips of his claws to your scalp. "Magic is a fucking joke," you continue: "anyone can do it, I've done it, but the people who rely on that are just too squeamish to do it by hand. Even the Joker tortures kids the normal way, kills them with his hands. You're just afraid—more afraid of mortality than actual mortals are." He hits you again, and his lip curls back all the further, at your blood smeared on his palm. "You like destruction, but not blood or pain, and that's why you have to have a fucking PET to anchor you to the real world. You couldn't take it, you couldn't live for a DAY."

Your hands itch in the gauntlets, as Teekl's growl rises into a terrible whine. Klarion releases your hair to toss you away from him, closing his bloody hand into a fist and breathing hard. Seething. "The Light has bigger plans than chaos," you push, watching it tighten at his side, "but your powers are convenient, so they indulge the petty little child, who thinks he can impress them by fucking up a BENCHED, STUPID ROOKIE."

He lands on top of you, all hard angles and claws, his breath cabbage boiled in tuna water and hibiscus petals. His hands scrabble at your throat, and that laughter takes up the back of your head, tickles its way out your mouth. It hurts but it hurts more to hold it in, and finally—finally. "A real fight," you spit, reaching for his horns and yanking his head back. "If you win, you get the real deal. You get to kill me. Do it with your hands, you pussy. Do it _right_."

"And if I lose," he hisses, something like spit hitting your face, but it feels like the lights thrown off a sparkler.

He presses down, they press up, from inside you. Fair is fair is fair is fair—

You're not that hurt. Not yet.

"I go home. You end it all, you send me back."

The moment holds, where he thinks about it. Gods don't have to make deals with mortals, but it's not his life on the line. Just yours, and wasn't that the point from the start? It begins with a death. "How does it end, Klarion?"

His hands tighten at your throat, but the smell of his body becomes—sweat, skin, cat—and the glow of his eyes fades. "Let's find out," he breathes, while you don't.

-

It's a long fight.

He's stronger than he looks, even without magic, without his cat. He has the weight of a real body now, and the will to live, the will to inflict pain even as he fusses and cries at his own injuries. You pull his hair, rip at his horns, shove his face into the dust, bite at his arms. Your armor affords you some protection, but you're already injured, already exhuasted, and if you thought more of him you would give a nod to the upper hand he's given himself. Your training is your only advantage, and it keeps you defensive of your ribs and arm, but he isn’t predictable enough to go for them on purpose. This fight is about desire, and he inflicts the pain on you he wants you to have, wants to see you receive. There’s no strategy in grabbing you by the ears and beating your face on the ground, just the exhilaration of _doing_ it, and the smell and sound of blood leaking from your nose, dust choking your mouth. There are no more boundaries in your mind: no more sharing the pain, no more advantages. You all feel it, full stop, and they weigh you down with how much they invite it in. That third voice drags and drags, wraps around it with his grief and beats himself up for leaving the house that night on Klarion’s hands. The second laughs and chokes and lashes out without finesse or strategy: he just wants to keep the fight going, keep the blows coming, keep edging closer and closer to the final strike. He’s so angry, so tired of being angry, so ready to die—

The first is the same placid exhaustion he brought from the moment they arrived. The observer, face behind a username. Being a hero is inherently selfish: your existence is based on other people remaining in need, in danger, and the belief that you should be the one to save them. Detective work is purer. Asking questions allows others to act. And yet, he asks nothing as they sap your will and let a monster pound you into the dirt.

You are still

a hero

—please—

You can’t do this. You don’t know how to do this: you don’t know how to die. The things they’re trying to spare you from haven’t happened yet, aren’t a part of you but through the filter of magic. You have Jack and Dana and Jaime, you have Steph, you have Bruce and Dick and Babs. You scrape the dust from your tongue with your teeth, swallow, and beg them: I can’t want this enough for us all, I shouldn’t have to—

help me—

help me, help me, help me—

Set cracks you back into pieces: the walls lance through your mind, drag the scream Klarion’s after from your throat. You can feel them again, tell them apart, but you don’t expect the savior you get. It’s him, the heaviest, the weakest, struggling up through his grief. There is Shiva’s training, and the well of black anger behind it. There is the pile of corpses, and there are their ghosts rising, tar dripping upside down from the black earth as you flip yourself over. The crab returns to the sky, the moon takes its course and the red bird rises to beat Klarion into the dirt. Shiva taught him to kill, but this fight isn’t to the death, not for you. This is about anger, about screaming at fate and punching chaos in the face. You don’t care if he’s mortal for moments, you wouldn’t care if you had to do it to the fucking cat: you hit the ball of nerves in his shoulder that leaves his arm dead and hit the one in his throat just to see him be the one puking on the black earth. “I’m going to live,” you say, over and over, your voice building as you pick yourself up off the ground and start kicking him. “I’m going to live, I’m going to LIVE,” a psychological war of _fucking optimism_ waged on his pointy blue ears. “I’M GOING.”

You leave it at that, your boot pressed to the side of his head, and stare at his cat like it’s next.

He doesn’t have the teeth to seethe, this time. Teekl takes your challenge, a friend in all incarnations, and gets shaken off your leg and onto his body, spitting and hissing. “I’m going,” you repeat, feeling the world tilt and black eating at your vision. The white light that appears doesn’t ease it, but you manage to stumble into it before your vision tunnels, and you pass out.

-

The crab is swept along by the river, broken apart on the rocks and flung to the currents. Anubis dips his cane, draws it from the water and breathes life back into the shell. Reaching up, he places it back in the sky, and retreats to a tomb. A man at his side stops, looking back to the stars. Sixteen points of light shine back at him, sixteen candles, sixteen years. It is more than some get. Less than others will. He follows large, canid prints into the tomb. A heavy stone slab is lowered into the entrance.

You watch it drop, memorizing the knowledge in his face, the grey in his hair. Not _your_ father. The moon passes away from you, no tail of feathers in its wake. Heroes live in the stars, after they’ve died: but so do monsters. You don’t belong here. It speaks enough to order that you feel the net break, the grid dissolve. You fall back to the river like a stone, and move on.

On the bank, the cart is turned upright. The wheel is slightly bent, but gives no more trouble without the weight.

-

The universe extracts your brain from the blender and pours it back into your head. You feel it, stumbling out the other side of the portal into Central Park. You should have been more specific, and the laughter that bubbles in your bruised throat is entirely your own.

They’re gone.

You’re surprised that he kept his end of the deal, but maybe it wasn’t up to him. He followed rules to set events in motion: you changed them. Something like that, a lot of hubris to it when your eyes are swelling shut and there’s blood on your face. “Can’t do this,” you mutter, laughing again. It doubles you over into a cough, pain all down your right side, all over your face, in your gut and your legs and your hands.

”Mount Justice to Robin, come in Robin.”

You huddle under relief, without your cape. Who knows when you would have pulled it together enough to make the call. “Copy that,” you answer hoarsely, cough, do no better. “He dumped me back in the park.”

”Wondergirl’s still in Gotham, I’ll have her pick you up.”

”Thank you.”

”You sound rough, I’ll get a med table prepped.”

”I’ll live,” you assure him, then switch the comm over. It hurts to keep moving your mouth. Your nose feels broken, but it could be worse. It could be your ribs, or your right wrist. Just sprains, you think. You stressed the wrist too much after your fall, not realizing how much it actually hurt. It all hurts, all the pain in one body, filling up the space they left in your head. That slightly razed feeling, where the walls used to be, and just—echoes. Memories you didn’t have before, impressions of yourself that even at your most introspective, you wouldn’t stumble upon. It’s not what you were afraid of when you asked Jaime, _what if_ , but it’s still _weird_.

The urge to wipe a hand over your face and pull all the skin tight raises your hand, but the damage stops you. Weak grip, you remember. Something to work on.

When Cassie lands, you make yourself stand up and walk to her. She must have been watching over the apartment. She knows where you live, now. Who you are. In another universe, she’s something like a best friend: a long-term emotional investment, a co-leader to a team you don’t quite have, here. You accept her knowing, and her hands, when she steps in to keep you upright. “Tim,” she says, no pretense, with the gleam of her eyes sliding over you in the dark. You just nod. You don’t know what there is to say, about any of it. “Alright. I’ve got you.” She helps you stoop into her grip, lifting you both off the ground. In the air, you wonder how she doesn’t freeze in her uniform, and the answer is already in you, waiting.

Her personality won’t allow the silence, and you drift in and out when she starts to speak. “You look awful, I hope you’re okay. I mean you’re going to be okay, we’ll take you back and Dick’s still there I think—and Jaime, and everyone who lives there. Your dad’s still fine, probably the only person who is fine, really, everyone’s been so worried—”

The wind cuts your eyes when you try to slit them, so you stop. You can’t go home like this, and you can’t stay in Maine, either. Leaning into her dense shoulder, you hide your face, try to breathe some warmer air, through your mouth. “Tim?”

”I know not to sleep,” you assure her. “Keep...just keep talking.”

-

Dick thumbs the edge of your eye, right on the bruise, because he’s always been an asshole. You find the strength to swat his hand away, and he backs off, reassured. Garfield bounds up to replace him, transforming mid-tackle into a small, slim-fingered primate. He wraps his frame around your head as gently as urgency allows, and holds on for long moments. Even his tail winds down around your throat, and he shakes a little while you reach up to pet him. “I’m okay,” you rasp, not even fumes left to run on and your voice wrung out on the flight. “Everyone’s okay, Gar. _Gar_.”

You coax him to climb off, onto your arm, and tuck him against your chest like a baby. M’gann shakes her head, giving it another moment before she steps in to take him.

Everyone is more aware than you, more aware of Jaime coming into the room and parting to give you a clear view of each other. Your eyes are too wet and swollen to see clearly, but you can tell that his hands are balled in fists, and black with crawling armor. He tightens them, keeping his distance until it recedes. You have to walk to him, to close the distance down to a few feet.

”You were right.” You don’t know what else to say. What there is to say, when he’s hurt and you’re...going to fall on him, if he draws this out now.

He stares at his hands, your feet; looks up, past all the tears in your armor and what he can see through it, to your sticky face. “Of course I was right,” he breathes, and hugs you too hard. “Pinche gringo,” in your ear, and again for emphasis: “I’m always right. Always, always, always.” You lean your head on his head, in front of everyone, and Dick still has it in him to whistle.

Four of your fingers still work just fine, so you give him one. “I’m going to fall over now,” you announce. Leaning into Jaime becomes executing a very controlled fall against him, while he fusses over what parts of you are safe enough to grab and pull on. Very few of them, you both find, and there it is: you hiss and spit at his hands, giving him permission to vent back. “You could have called someone in the first time you fell down a fucking hole,” he yells, figuring out which arm you can still use and pulling you up with it, over his shoulder to take you back to the showers. “You are too stupid to be alive—”

”What does that make Klarion?”

”A dead blue whatever-the-fuck he is,” he huffs. Smiling hurts, but you do your best to squeeze him with your arm, and smile. “An elf? A vulcan?”

”Witch-boy,” you wheeze.

”Pathetic,” he says, clicking his tongue at the back of his teeth and hefting you higher, just to jostle you. Just like he would have three days ago, and you squeeze him again, grateful.

-

He helps you reassure and wave off the audience forming in the locker room, pare it down to the plural _you_ and Mal. Dick will help you tie your ribs and wrist, later, but you still can’t be injured in front of him without a heavy dose of humiliation. Success feels like failure, where his successes would be better, cleaner. It doesn’t matter what he says in the moment.

”So,” Mal asks, watching Jaime yank your tunic off over your wrung-out shoulder and call you a baby when you pale through the bruising on your face. “How long have you two been a thing?”

”Too long,” Jaime seethes, ruthless with your armor and undershirt. There’s no more staving off their worry, acting like you’re in better shape than you are. You’re one big bruise, a lot of scrapes, and there are sores on your hands from the gauntlets. Jaime glares at your ribs, mouth set, and turns his attention to your tights. Mal asks, “How long is too long,” with some humor, and moves to steady you while Jaime hunts the marks down your body, strips you to your underwear and still isn’t satisfied. He’s quiet, and Mal’s answering silence implies the question again.

”Six months.” You sway a little, between their hands, and memory sinks from your throat to your gut: “Six months exactly, today.”

”Happy anniversary,” Jaime says, his hand holding the deepest bruise on your thigh and his head tilted up at you. Mal is just one of many things, turning the context inside-out and stretching it too thin to be funny, or ironic. This isn’t how either of you expected this day to go, but maybe you should have. “I’m sorry,” you say, as sincerely exasperated as you are guilt-ridden.

Too thin, and it snaps. Jaime sits back on his heels, your remaining boot half-off, and stops scowling. Stops posturing, if posturing can be done with genuine feeling, or at least stops doing it in your direction. “It’s not your fault,” he says. Leave it at that.

They’re not there to tell you otherwise.

Mal cuffs you in the middle of your back, gently. “Renegotiate date-night after a shower, Boy Wonder.” He looks over your shoulder at Jaime, “And a hot meal, and a good night’s sleep with the pillowcase I plan to see how many ice packs I can fit.” You are immediately and ravenously hungry, immediately and acutely aware, again, of your aches. Jaime stops posturing in anyone’s direction, deflating with your boot in his hands. He can’t do this either, doesn’t know how, but he’s trying.

”One foot, then the other,” you say gently. He doesn’t get it, but he pulls your boot the rest of the way off. There are sores on your feet to match your hands. You are such a mess, and so _visibly_ a mess. “I think—” it’s painful to ask for, though you don’t know why—

Pretense. Jaime is a boy, and that is entirely why. “I think we should meet you in the medical bay,” you finish, and Mal laughs with his hand solid on your shoulder.

”I wasn’t planning on following you to the showers,” he says, and Jaime starts shaking his head, _I am_ not _gonna do anything—_ But Mal laughs this off as well. He sounds tired, the way you all sound when a mission is over. There’s always the next emergency to brace for, and he’ll puzzle over the Zeta readings until he feels an understanding of this one, better prepared for the next. Maybe Karen will help him, maybe he can renegotiate date-night too. “Go easy on each other,” is all he adds, putting a hand over his yawn. “Don’t take too long.”

You stare at each other, trying to find what ground you’re meant to stand on, in this situation. The reunion is over, the relief is passing, and now—Jaime is facing you in a condition your body has hinted at in the past, and you’re facing his reaction. You try to sniff against the overwhelming clog that is half your face, and wince. Mouth-breathing it is.

Slowly, he climbs back up you, cataloging the damage again. At his full height, he takes your face in both hands, careful now, and just looks. You close your eyes, rest them, and let him. “I’m so…angry,” he says, sounding helpless. Sounding like he did on the street, the day you found Tye’s skateboard. “I don’t…like it.”

”I don’t like having a bruise for a face,” you say, “So I guess—”

”I’m not mad at _you_.”

”I know.”

He coughs. “Tim, what if I, next time—what if this is why—”

”You’re not going to take over the world. We’ve already gone off that path, if we ever managed to get on it. You never saved Tye, we never dated, Bart was never _here_.”

”That’s true,” he whispers.

You open your eyes, just slits, then force them wider. Not much, but you want to see if he’s crying. You’d understand if he did, but you understand his dry face, too. He’s seen this before, and seen it creeping up on him in your stitched ears and taped ribs. It’s still a shock, and you’re both dulled down to blunt slow objects. Knock together, like—stimming against a wall, but the wall is you and his arms don’t hit. He loops them around you to carry you to the shower block. His hands are yours, just yours, to know and recall and look forward to. Hands that wash you, hands that robe you, hands that let you down to walk your own body to the medical bay. Hands that hold yours while Dick cracks your nose back in place, and crying out hurts as much as the pinch did. Jaime squeezes back as hard as you squeeze him, counterpoint to your pain and saying, this hurt me too, you hurt me tonight, don’t forget.

No, oh no: don’t be the one who forgets.

Mal is your favorite person, when he makes good on the promised pillowcase, already going soggy with bagged ice. Dick hums that you’re a little feverish, and Mal tells him to shut up, that you can sweat it out when you’re more green than purple. Dick agrees. There’s an astonished laugh under his voice, his usual laugh finding itself even tonight. “I’m going to be fine,” you say, and he lays his hand on your forehead again, holds it awhile.

”I never thought otherwise, Tim.”

You don’t need one of them to help you think, that’s part of the problem, but you’re missing the part of you that would say it out loud. You just smile, tightly, until his hand disappears.

Jaime is your second-favorite person, your second-to-be-favorite person, when he stays to help you eat. You curl your injured side around the pillow until half your body is numb, and Jaime curls around the rest of you, cutting and feeding you fruit, adjusting your head fifty times and unsuccessfully trying to spoon-feed you soup from every bad angle. You give up, full of banana slices and aspirin, and ready for real sleep. There is only one of you now, and you’ve been dragged over space-and-time’s cheese grater, ripped through a series of holes and settled in shavings, melted back to a solid mass. “Do you feel…different,” Jaime asks, as you both drift toward sleep.

”Yes.”

He waits, holding to consciousness for the rest of the answer. You don’t know what to say, how much to say. Someone tried to kill you, a little more on-purpose and personal than usual, and you feel changed. He felt different when Bart laid the weight of the apocalypse on his shoulders, and there wasn’t much mystery to that, either. Shit happens, shit keeps happening, just like he told you. There’s nothing to say, that won’t become apparent over time.

”My face was a lot less puffy before this,” you say, and he slaps your good arm, turns on his side to hug it. “Menso,” he breathes, and you know for certain now: everything is going to be alright.

-

Your phone pleads you awake from its charger, reminding you that you need to be leaving for home in an hour. You have the option of lying, of claiming that Jaime’s family will take you to school, and Jack will buy your absence for another eight hours. Hours you could use sleeping, or planning your lie, or—

Jaime rolls over. Your side of the bed is soaked, your bag of ice emptied into the mattress and giving you chills. Your sleep was deep and dreamless, but waking up in the dark and wet makes you nervous. Thinking about Jack, thinking about what happened—it feels like creatures are forming in the corners, waiting to lumber up and strike you again and again. It’s a feeling you suspect will crop up for a very long time, wariness beat into your muscle-memory like the false and driving rain. You’ll be wary of the dark, wary of your dreams, and wary of Jack. So wary of Jack.

It’s no way to live, in a small space with another person, and not tell them why.

The wet bed sticks and holds you on your side. Jaime dreams his hand up your leg and to your arm, says your name to a figment of you, a construct that doesn’t exist and does, at the same time. He’s kissing your shoulder and kissing your ghost, and he never said it back and he never had to. He’s the most solid person you’ve ever met, and you’re willing to bet—he’s more or less the same in every universe, every timeline. He could split a hundred ways and still function. He’d be his own best friend, his own favorite person, laugh at his own jokes and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, he’d get home again. He’d laugh at your fear instead of fuel it, and kiss you just to show them all: this is what chances taste like.

You look at Jack’s contact page on your phone, and hope he’s like that. Hope he doesn’t try to shoot Bruce, hope he doesn’t make you quit—but you’ll take both if it means he’ll come out the other side. Being Robin cost so much in the first place: you could set it aside for now, to have Jack say it, to be there to say it back.

 _I’m not at jaimes,_ you type with your good hand, slow and steady. _I can’t come home right now but I will be by tonight. I need to talk to you, I need you to—_

You stop, staring at the screen. The cursor blinks, waiting. Originally, you had planned to remove all traces of your costume from your room, to a different part of the building. Originally, you had planned to never know how your life unfolds in alternate timelines.

Originally, you had planned for her to live and your life to be nothing like this, at all.

Jaime says your name again, fits his face to the dip of your shoulder and starts breathing on your hair. It begins with a death: that’s chaos. Not for the dead, but the people left behind. The information never shared, the leaps never made, the timelines fracturing infinitely from a hard blow.

 _I need you to remove the panel at the back of my closet, and wait for me_ , you finish typing. There won’t be more than a spare belt in it right now, but that will be enough. It will at least tell him a great deal of things it _isn’t_ , until you’re there to fill in the blanks.

Hitting send is easy: turning the phone off is easier. You roll against Jaime until he whines, hands fussing with his sleep-dirty face until his eyes open. He groans at the hour and the wet spot and the fact that it wasn’t all a dream, a groan for every intrusion as he sits up and lets you prod him off the bed. “Come on,” you say, rolling gingerly to your feet. You’re more sore now than you were last night. “I’m hungry and wet and my face hurts: let’s do this over and see if we get it right.”

**Author's Note:**

> A single page from Identity Crisis on the tracked tag made me so sad that I wrote over 10k that has everything and nothing to do with it. I don't even know anymore: if you made it this far, I salute you.


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